Habakkuk 1:1-4, 2:1-4; 2 Timothy 1:1-14; Luke 17:5-6
Be like the bird, pausing in his flight
On limb too slight,
Feels it give way, yet sings,
Knowing he has wings to fly.
-Victor Hugo
Oh yeah. That’s it, isn’t it? That’s what faith is like except we are not birds. We are human beings and our wings are not so obvious or natural. The great prophet and pastor of the twentieth century, William Sloane Coffin put it well though (and you will note the difference between us and the birds): “First you leap and then you grow wings.”
In Tigger’s case (see chapter 4 “In Which it is shown that Tiggers Don’t Climb Trees) he didn’t leap so much as fall and he didn’t grow wings at all but he fell on Eeyore and his friends who broke his fall. Sometimes faith is like that, too, the part where we get in the way enough to break the fall of the falling. When they were discussing what to do about Tigger while he was still up in the tree it did come up the idea that Eeyore could get hurt and Pooh asks Eeyore if it could hurt and Eeyore’s words are also a statement about the experience of faith and of courage when he said: That’s what would be so interesting, Pooh. Not being quite sure till afterwards.
The part about the limb giving way is a feeling we can understand. The bird can sing because he knows that he can fly but how will we keep singing when the limb gives under us, when things fall apart, when the world we had such hopes for never gets better. How long, O Lord?! It will not do to resort to denial. Even the Psalms cry out of the violence that rules the human heart and savages the human community. The very people of God themselves declare that they will bash the little ones of Babylon Babylon still exists only we call it Iraq Babylon
Have any of you read Annie Dillard? She writes that crash helmets should be standard issue when we come to church. She says we have no idea what we are getting into, what posers we evoke, when we open this book of books called the Bible.
This Bible, she writes, this ubiquitous black chunk of a bestseller, is a chink – often the only chink – through which winds howl. It is a singularity, a black hole into which our rich and multiple world strays and vanishes. We rack open its pages at our peril. Many educated, urbane, and flourishing experts in every aspect of business, culture, and science have felt pulled by this anachronistic, semibarbaric mass of antique laws and fabulous tales from far away; they entered its queer, strait gates and were lost.”
What is she on to, do you suppose? If anything, she is seeking with her words, the truth, a truth that holds within itself both horror and incredible hope, the truth about us and the truth about God and the truth about the Bible which tells the story, unmasks the demons, reveals the salvation that is at least as possible as the perishing of the world.
We do not celebrate today a reconciled world, a world where love rules and hatred has finally been overcome. We do not celebrate peace on earth. What we Christians, united or not, are celebrating on this World Communion Sunday is that we are sharing Holy Communion around the world whether we agree or not on what following Jesus asks us to do and be; whether or not we even agree on what Holy Communion is or means. We gather our broken body in the broken body of Christ and, if only for a moment, we are one, despite ourselves, we are one. And in that moment of surrender we are vulnerable to being changed forever for no matter our own personal motivation for being here and participating in this rite, giving ourselves to this mystery, adding our story to the story of stories, the symbol of the ritual holds within it the reality that it symbolizes and that reality always has the power to break our hearts, hearts unknowingly hardened by fear and despair and anger and boredom, and bring us back to the sanity of life in Christ who embodies not only what love is but what peace is, in the words of the writer to Timothy, “the good treasure”, This grace given to us in Christ Jesus before the ages began, but is now been revealed through the appearing of our Savior Jesus Christ, who abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel.”
Faith in this simple but “impossible” truth is our wings to fly. When Jesus is asked to “increase their faith his answer is revealing. IF you even have a little faith you could fly, the implication being that it is not about increasing faith but having any faith at all. Even the tiniest amount of faith is enough to save us, is enough to see us through the night, is enough to give us the courage we will need to live in a world such as ours and not give up. I cannot remember now where I read this and the words have become my own over time as I forgot where I read them but cannot forget what they mean to me: The struggle for justice is the struggle that is never won and the struggle that is never lost. Do you hear that? It is a struggle that goes on and the good news is that it isn’t over despite the condition of the world in our day and the good news is that it is worth the struggle to carry on whether we even know what winning or losing is anymore because this old world has been this way for a while and will be this way for as long as we have left to be.
When the old prophet cried out, How long O Lord? He spoke for us all forever and before long it was the same voice that lifts the response of those who have wings to fly:
We will stand at the watchposts
and station ourselves on the rampart;
we will keep watch to see what God will say to us
and what God’s answer will be to our cries.
Like faith that is not about being increased but about being at all, faithfulness is not about saving the world but carrying on until the world is saved. It is about living abundantly, to keep on giving when there is nothing left to give, to keep on hoping when all hope is gone, to keep caring when no one cares anymore, to keep loving life and the world and all that God has given us in the time we have left to love even when all the evidence seems to declare that love has finally abandoned us for good. This faith is fragile because we are fragile but it is also indestructible because it comes from God. Jesus seems to be saying that we don’t need to increase it. We need, first, to embrace it and it will carry us. It will give us wings to fly.
Today is World Communion in a world at war. People are being hurt. Lives are being lost, hopes and dreams shattered. And everywhere, love is still possible. When we break the bread and lift the cup we are not kidding around. We are proclaiming the grace and love of God to the world and we are surrendering ourselves to the faith that will not give up on this world or on ourselves because our God will never give up on us. As the prophet said, the people of God will live by faith. We will endure. We will love where love is absent. We will rise up in the ruins of the world and declare a new day. We will overcome what is evil with what is good. When all is lost we shall declare that the lost shall be found. We will use our wings to fly and, like Eeyore, we will put ourselves in the way to catch those who have no wings to fly and who just keep falling for we are people of God and we will live in this broken world by faith with courage and love and mercy and, at this holy table, share as one with all the world the undying hope for a new day.
